Prison issue kept off table

Governor predicts Legislature will OK budget agreement

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger yesterday predicted the budget agreement reached with legislative leaders this week will be approved by the Legislature, saying lawmakers will sidestep a controversy over a proposal to release thousands of prison inmates early.

Legislators plan to begin voting late today on the more than two-dozen bills implementing the spending cuts, borrowing and funding shifts Republican and Democratic leaders crafted to close a $26.3 billion deficit.

Schwarzenegger said the bills won't detail how to cut more than $1 billion in prison spending, after Republican leaders threatened to block any budget that included provisions to release inmates early.

“We are going to get this budget done,” the Republican governor told reporters outside his Capitol office yesterday. “We are going to get the votes.”

Republicans' concerns clouded prospects for passage of the plan to erase a deficit that pushed the state close to insolvency.

Because lawmakers have yet to pass changes to the $100 billion general fund budget to compensate for a decline in revenue brought on by the recession, California has been forced to pay some bills with IOUs to avoid running out of cash. Meanwhile, the state's credit rating has dropped to near junk-bond status.

Assemblyman Sam Blakeslee of San Luis Obispo and Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth of Temecula, the Republican leaders who brokered the budget agreement with Schwarzenegger and Democratic counterparts, yesterday said that negotiators agreed to wait until next month — after the budget was passed — to decide how to reduce prison expenses.

Advocates for the inmate-release plan say it would involve nonviolent, non-sex-offending inmates with up to a year left on their sentence. Many would be relegated to home detention with electronic monitoring, while some ill inmates would go to non-prison hospitals. Others would earn time served for completing rehabilitation programs or gaining high school diplomas.

Keeping the issue out of the budget is what the parties agreed to, Blakeslee said.

“We had an agreement that it would not be part of the budget so that the public would have a chance to review this and not end up with an 11th-hour jam job,” he told reporters after the governor's remarks. “So, we are glad.”

The budget agreement requires passage by a two-thirds majority. While Democrats hold majorities in both chambers of the Legislature, they are a handful of votes shy of such a supermajority.

In February, a budget agreement reached by Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders nearly collapsed until round-the-clock bargaining sessions led enough Republicans to break ranks with their party to pass it.

This time around, many Democrats are threatening to oppose the package because of deep cuts to health, welfare, schools and local government.